What Is SEO and how to get the most out of it? – SEO Beginner Guide Part 01

What Is SEO and how to get the most out of it?

Do you own a business? Or are you planning to open your own business very soon? Does your business have a website? Are you a student with a Marketing background/specialization? Are you currently working in the Marketing department of any company? Or are you planning to work in corporate houses in the Marketing department? If your answer is “Yes!” to any of these questions, then this blog is for you. Enjoy the read!

A Day in this Digital Era
You wake up on a fine morning during the rainy season. You have an interview 5 kilometers away, so you check the weather app on your smartphone, input your location, and check whether it will rain or not. And you start to get ready accordingly.

You aren’t sure how casual or formal the office and personnel are, so you Google the company to see their website. The website comes up in the results on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page), and you click through to their website where you find their office photos including their interior as well as exterior, which made you feel that the office is easily accessible.

Next, you open your Google map app on your smartphone and try to find out the shortest route to the company. You arrive early (thanks to the route you searched) and decide to wait in a coffee shop. Again, your search for “coffee shops near me” in Google suggested several pinpointed options. You choose one nearest shop with a comparatively better menu option. You like the coffee and ambiance so you open your social media app, “check in” and post a photo of your coffee.

Most of us are attached to the online world; and when we’re online, we’re searching all the time.

What is SEO in Digital Marketing?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is an organic way of increasing traffic to your sites. It means people will come to your website based on the content (as a service provider or a product seller) you provide rather than by paying money for the search engine traffic. SEO is free to do. And very beneficial, if you know how to do SEO properly.

Being present in the digital realm (search engines and social media) has a lot of advantages. First of all, unlike in the traditional realm, there are no restrictions on costs, assets, locations, and markets. Even though you are just starting your business, you can compete with large brick-and-mortar businesses. You can have a large customer base from around the globe, you can go after the extreme niche customer, and you can do marketing activities at a very low cost. Not only could businesses connect to previously untapped niche customers from anywhere, but by doing so they can also extend their product life cycle as they can get new sales for products beyond their mass markets. This is also known as the “infinite niche” which means there is always one more customer out there who is worth tapping.

There is another concept called extreme niche keywords that can be applied to SEO marketing. Rather than fighting for broad terms such as “skirt”, search marketers can target the niche and use terms like “white and pink floral skirt”. Also, there is a high possibility of people purchasing the product if they are searching for the latter rather than people who are just searching for a “skirt”. Thus, micro-targeting can help the business.

WordPress SEO Optimization Tips

Now that we have talked about the basics of SEO, let’s focus on how SEO:

1. Always set clear SEO objectives and actionable strategies. The objectives can be to increase brand awareness, generate leads, increase sales, etc.
2. Search engines value real and sincere content experts. Search engines will reward those who generate authentic content and will punish those who are creating content just for the sake of SEO by keyword bombing or harvesting.
3. Write for your readers, not for SEO. It might take time but you’ll get better rankings once more and more readers start reading your content.
4. Even though everything that you are doing is right, it might take time to be on top. But unlike paid ranking, the organic ranking will be sustainable. In the paid ranking, your site will be gone from the top as if it never existed.
5. Social media and reputation management are critical. You need to continuously monitor your brand mentions in social media, reviews, and on SERP.
6. Content is king. Search engines love genuine but relevant content. The higher the relevancy, the better.
7. Traditional keyword metatags don’t matter. However, they work for rich snippets or microdata. There are plugins like Yoast and All-in-One SEO available in WordPress for this purpose.
8. There are several tools like AdWords Keyword Planner, Keywords Everywhere, Keyword sheeter, and many more web apps that help you to find many relevant keywords for your business. You can include those keywords in your content as part of the SEO perspective, for better indexing.
9. For WordPress to work better, you need to update the themes and plugins once they are available.
10. There are too many themes and plugins available for WordPress. You just need to find the right ones for your needs and build a better website. Make sure that everything you do will enhance the user experience so that they will keep on coming back.

Content Strategies to List Your Site in SERP

What Drives the Search Results in your SERP?
The answer to this question is not that simple. There are hundreds of SEO factors to look upon. Search engines like Google never reveal their secret as they do not want to be taken advantage of by SEO. As mentioned earlier, search engines favor genuine content by experts. However, various articles have been written and research has been done to know the behavior of search engines.

Search engines drive search results via their algorithms. After the ongoing technological interpretations of searches, content, and everything, the search engines start to derive senses from those data and start to serve the best possible results.

Search engines also use the web visitors’ behavior on a particular site to decide whether or not to list that site on the first few pages. If the visitors spend a longer duration on a particular site then it reveals that the site has quality content as the visitors are engaged for a longer duration. But if the visitors immediately bounce back to the search engine then it means the content was either irrelevant or of poor quality. This will lead the page to have a poor search engine ranking.

You should also note that browser history also affects search results to a large extent. For example, I work in a digital advertising agency and its name is Trilogy Digital Media. And when I searched the word “media”, the result displayed the meaning of the word from various sites and even displayed the name of a digital advertising agency. It means my search result is kind of skewed. If I want to test search engine crawls of keywords or sites neutrally, then I should first clear the browsing history as well as cookies. I searched the word “media” again. But now the results included very random results – from a flowering plant called Stellaria media to the windows media player.

Also, if you want neutral search engine results, do not forget to log out of your accounts as it still remembers the keywords you’ve searched.

What do the Search Engine Results Listings Comprise?

You have to do a lot of things to optimize your site so that it appears on the search engine results page (SERP). Some of them are briefly discussed below:

• Sitelinks: Sometimes, when you search for a company or any other business, it comes at the top of the page. And under the main website link, there are links to specific pages like About Us, Our Services, Careers, Contact Us, and so on which appear in organized columns. For example, refer to Figure 1.1. You can see the Contact and About Us page with a pinned map. These are called site links. To achieve them, your site needs to be better optimized and each of your pages should receive higher traffic.

  

• Local SEO: When you search for restaurants, party palaces, or banks in Google Map, a list of pins appear. These pins are “local” to the area you are searching, meaning they are near your location. You can also see ratings with stars and reviews. The better your ratings, the better chance of your business being listed in SERP.
• Paid Ads: On the SERP, the paid ads typically appear on the top (see Figure 1.2). When you search Google and get both paid results and organic listing, which one do you click?

  

• Snippets: Snippets are the one-two-line description that you see below the web page title in the SERP (as you can see in Figure 1.3). You can draft your snippet by including meaningful keywords, which is better than what Google would typically provide on its own. Rich snippets allow search engines to understand what content is there on the site. In WordPress, you can easily add meaningful snippets by using tools like Yoast SEO.

  

• Images and video results: You might have noticed that even when you search for something in Google, you get video and image results along with regular text listings. Typically we use Youtube to search for videos but Google will also lead you to search for related videos. This is possible because of best SEO practices.

Takeaway

You might have understood that everything that we do online is somehow affected by SEO. Even the coffee shop you visited by looking up on Google Maps might be the result of the coffee shop doing the best SEO practice in Kathmandu Nepal, which is in their local area.

So, if you want to be successful like that coffee shop, you might want to optimize your site and try to list your site at the top of the search engine result page. You can follow the tips provided above and perform better SEO. Likewise, you also know about the different attributes of search engine result listings, and how the list of results is presented to the keyword researchers on the result page. With the help of plugins like Yoast and All-in-one SEO available in WordPress, you can optimize each of your web pages and list your site in the first few pages of the search result.

You also need to have quality content on your site to engage the visitors for a longer period. And once they start to spend more time on your website, your ranking will start to improve. Then more and more visitors will click through to your website leading to better and better ranking. Get updated through Best Practices for Search Engine Optimization by following our blog regularly.

Courtesy: Trilogy Digital Pathshala – Best SEO Training in Nepal